Chapter 32
When the American Eugenics Society wanted to alert Americans that the feebleminded and immigrants were polluting the gene pool, it embarked on a strategy of sponsoring exhibits at state fairs like this one in Kansas in 1920. Since nearly half of the U.S. population was still rural and accustomed to propagating livestock for desirable traits, the AES reasoned that country folk would be receptive to breeding more desirable people with the same enthusiasm they bred plumper pigs and chunkier chickens. Inside the exhibits hung a wooden sign proclaiming “Some People Are Born to Be a Burden on the Rest,” a haiku-short distillation of fears stirred to a xenophobic froth by best sellers such as “The Passing of the Great Race,” and “The Rising Tide of Color Against White Supremacy.” Blinking displays drew the rapt crowd’s attention to alarming statistics on the birthrate of defectives: Every 15 seconds a light flashed to indicate $100 in tax money had been squandered in that short span on those with “bad heredity,” while every 48 seconds another light flashed, showing the frequency of babies born fated to reach adulthood with a mental age of eight or less. Meanwhile, off to the right, a lonely light that flared just once every seven-and-a-half minutes signified the birth, in the exhibitor’s corseted language, of a “high grade person who will have the ability to do creative work and be fit for leadership.” A meager 4 percent of the American population, the AES calculated, fell into this preferred category on whom the burden of maintaining this demographic dead weight—whose ranks included alcoholics, paupers, Mediterraneans, Asians, those chronically in trouble with the law (i.e., the poor), and even the nearsighted—would fall.
The AES’s efforts were mirrored by those of the Eugenics Record Office. Officially opened in 1910, the ERO was funded directly and indirectly by the hugely moneyed Carnegie Institution and the cash-burdened widow of railroad mogul E.H. Harriman. The Cold Spring Harbor, New York-based ERO (and its precursor associations) was headed by Charles Davenport and Harry Laughlin. (Alexander Graham Bell served as the ERO’s chairman of the Board of Scientific Directors.) For these two, eugenics and the cleansing of racial impurities were the Cheerios that they devoured for breakfast every morning. “Can we build a wall high enough around this country,” Davenport wondered years ahead of the recent presidential campaign, “so as to keep out these cheaper races . . .?”
Davenport’s master-race enthusiasms found a sympathetic audience early on at the American Breeders Association conferences. At the ABA’s inaugural 1903 meeting, the organization agreed to add a Eugenics Committee, which resolved to “emphasize the value of superior blood and the menace to society of inferior blood. Working closely with the ABA, the ERO eventually marked ten populations for extraction from the country’s genetic stock, including the feebleminded, the poor, epileptics, the deaf, blind, and mute—even those jailed for not paying fines.
Additionally, it was a given that Italians were hardwired for violence, the Irish impoverished mentally and prone to drink, and Jews programmed by nature to be money-grubbing and selfish. All would be appropriately culled in time.
The eugenicists’ Lovecraftian vision of a bleached and purified public would be realized through widespread polygamy and carefully arranged mating for superior bloodlines. For those unfortunate enough to be lumped under the ten groups designated for expulsion from the gene pool, restrictive marriage laws, segregation or incarceration, sterilization, and euthanasia on a mass scale were prescribed.
The AES, ERO, and ABA were hardly the lunatic fringe—more like the lunatic center. Davenport at one point or another was an esteemed member of sixty-four scientific societies, including the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Institute of Social Science—the last awarding him a gold medal in 1923.
Even the most progressive Americans had long begrudged the lesser breeds cockroaching into and over the country. Suffragist Victoria Woodhull began promoting eugenic practices in the early 1870s, outlining her breeding ideas in her booklet “Stirpiculture; or, The Scientific Propagation of the Human Race.” In 1901, the eugenicist David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University, published “The Blood of the Nation: A Study in the Decay of Races by the Survival of the Unfit” in Popular Science magazine. In 1905, playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote that “nothing but a eugenic religion can save our civilization.” In her 1922 book, “The Pivot of Civilization,” birth-control pioneer Margaret Sanger praised the eugenicists for their common-sense foresight in “emphasizing the danger of irresponsible and uncontrolled fertility of the ‘unfit’ and the feeble-minded . . .” Writing the introduction to Sanger’s book, H.G. Wells fumed that “We want fewer and better children . . . and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict upon us.”
In 1916, Madison Grant, conservationist and trustee of the American Museum of Natural History, authored “The Passing of the Great Race: or the Racial Basis of European History,” reasoning that only the Anglo-Saxons and other Nordics from northwestern Europe should be allowed to enter the country. Putting an exclamation point on it, he suggested “the Laws of Nature require the obliteration of the unfit.” The book generated admiring correspondence from its many readers, including one fanboy who explained how the book had become his “Bible.” The gushing admirer? Adolph Hitler.
Grant helped found the AES in the wake of the enthusiasm whipped up by the Second International Conference on Eugenics, promoting racial hygiene.
American Philosophical Society
The First International Eugenics Congress had been held in London in 1912, convening hundreds of international delegates, including Alfred Ploetz, who later spearheaded Germany’s eugenics movement. “Had Jesus been among us,” said Dr. Albert Wiggam, author, psychologist, and member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, “he would have been president of the First Eugenic Congress.” (Years later in 1945, Wiggam appeared on the Chase & Sanborn Hour’s “The Charlie McCarthy Show” where he unsuccessfully matched wits with the snarky dummy.)
There were three Eugenic Congresses in all, as well as ongoing shows such as the National Congress on Race Betterment, and the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference. The AES also exhibited at the 1926 Sesquicentennial Exposition in Philadelphia, repeating its messaging with the same flashing lights and scary statistics as it had at the Kansas State Fair.
One of the tactics the AES devised to spotlight this deluge of depraved DNA was Fitter Families Contests. Originally inspired by a “Better Baby” competition at the 1911 Iowa State Fair, the contests were held in conjunction with the AES exhibits. After aspiring families filled out an “Abridged Record of Family Traits,” which tabulated traits such as talking in your sleep or issuing soft bowel movements, a team of physicians performed a battery of physical and psychological tests on them. Once completed, the doctors issued a letter grade to the contestants, with families who earned a B+ or better receiving a medal proclaiming, “Yea, I have a goodly heritage.” The various eugenics shows, the exhibits at fairs, and ERO’s Harry Laughlin helped inspire the Immigration Act of 1924, which throttled the flow of southern and eastern Europeans, aka, “social inadequates.” Often called the National Origins Act, the legislation attempted to restrict new immigration to just 2 percent of what a given group’s U.S. population was in 1890. Since there were many more Nordics and Anglo-Saxons then, and few Asians and Mediterraneans, each group benefited accordingly. For example, the quota for Italians would be hacked from 42,000 per year to just 4,000.
The ambitions of these “intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic,” as the pro-eugenics Wells described his humanity-destroying Martians in The War of the Worlds, didn’t stop with building a legal wall against immigrants. Their malevolent influence poured out of them, like diseased blood from a severed artery. Religious leaders competed in the AES’s popular Eugenics Sermon Contest. At one point nearly 400 institutions of higher learning embraced eugenics in their curriculums, including Harvard University, Columbia University, and Cornell University. Virginia passed its Racial Integrity Act, based on the ERO’s Laughlin’s sterilization act. The Act outlawed sexual congress between whites and blacks and eventually become the model for Germany’s Nuremberg Laws. By 1935, more than 30 American states had enacted sterilization laws.
Among them, California in 1909 became the third state to legalize such treatment. The decree permitted superintendents of state psychiatric institutions to sterilize patients to better their “physical, mental, or moral condition,” a door wide enough to push the Statue of Liberty through. By 1952, the Golden State had fixed 20,000 inmates, its contribution to staving off the prospect of a mongrel and degraded race.
After Hitler promulgated the Nuremberg Laws in 1935, which excluded German Jews from German citizenship and barred them from marrying or having sexual congress with persons of German blood, the ERO felt it important to support its brother eugenicists in their racial cleansing. Through its propaganda organ, the Eugenical News, it acted as cheerleader for the Third Reich, rah-rah-rahing its efforts, pointing proudly to 16,000 American sterilizations that would ensure a happier, healthier future for the nation.
Sensitive to the negative press its racial hygiene program was receiving in the United States, Nazi eugenicist Ernst Rodenwaldt thought it might be good to counter-spin the bad publicity by awarding the ERO’s Laughlin special recognition for his invaluable aid to Reich policy, which included publishing a translation of the Nazis’ Law for the Prevention of Defective Progeny. After receiving an honorary degree from the University of Heidelberg, Laughlin responded with “I was greatly honored.”
The bad often die late. For decades, the International Eugenics Congress, the National Congress on Race Betterment, and the Neo-Malthusian and Birth Control Conference were as imposing as mountain ranges on the cultural topography, and yet all vanished as quietly as the morning dew. It took until 1939 for the ERO to be shut down, losing its funding after its popularity and influence tanked. The U.S. Supreme Court didn’t strike down a 1935 Oklahoma law that allowed involuntary sterilization for repeat criminals until 1942. The Immigration Act of 1924 wasn’t fully vacated until the passing of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. The eugenicists, popularized and legitimized through exhibitions and conferences, achieved part of their dream, with 60,000 Americans sterilized. There are no people more dangerous than those who promise they can lift humanity higher by remaking it in their image.